The Wounded Civilization — Part 3: The Inheritance

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How the Indian republic carried the wound, 1947–2008.

Hindu Nationalism in Independent India

Three Shots at Birla House

On the evening of 30 January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi walked out to his daily prayer meeting in the garden of Birla House in Delhi. A man stepped from the crowd, bowed to him, and fired three shots at close range. Gandhi died within minutes.

The assassin, Nathuram Godse, did not run. At his trial he explained himself at length. He blamed Gandhi for Partition, for what he called the appeasement of Muslims, and for the fast that had pressed the Indian government, only weeks earlier, to release funds owed to Pakistan. Godse believed that Gandhi’s politics of non-violence and conciliation had left Hindus defenseless, and that the new nation could only become strong once he was gone. He was hanged in November 1949.

The consequences for the Hindu nationalist movement were immediate. Within a week of the killing, the government banned the RSS. The Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, concluded that the conspiracy itself had been hatched by a fanatical fringe of the Hindu Mahasabha rather than by the RSS as an organization. But in a letter that July he wrote that the activities of both bodies, “particularly the former,” meaning the RSS, had created “an atmosphere” in the country “in which such a ghastly tragedy became possible.” The ban was lifted in 1949, after the RSS adopted a written constitution and pledged to stay out of politics. Savarkar was tried as a conspirator and acquitted. But Hindu nationalism had been tainted with the blood of the Father of the Nation, and it would spend a generation on the margins of Indian public life.

Into the space it vacated stepped the Nehruvian settlement. The Constitution that came into force in 1950 made every Indian an equal citizen regardless of religion, guaranteed freedom of conscience, protected the right of minorities to run their own educational institutions, and established no state religion. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister for the next seventeen years, often warned that the communalism of a majority was more dangerous than that of a minority, because it could pass itself off as nationalism. The new republic would be secular, and it would deal with the wounds of the past by refusing to let them define the future.

For readers joining the series here, a short recap. Part 1, The Soil and the Encounter, examined seven centuries of Islamic rule and concluded that the events were real, the violence and the synthesis alike, but that the memories they left were plural and local, with no single story binding them together. Part 2, The Narrators, showed how that single story was assembled in the colonial era: by British historians who wrote India’s past as a drama of Hindu glory, Muslim fall and British rescue, by census officials who fixed every Indian into one religion, and by Hindu and Muslim reformers who turned the new story into politics. It ended with Partition, when the memory of conquest became, for millions of families, lived experience.

This third part asks what the Indian republic did with that inheritance between 1947 and 2008. Its answer, in brief, is that the republic chose a kind of silence. It was an understandable choice, and in many ways an honorable one. It was also costly. The memory did not disappear. It went underground, into families and neighborhoods, and over the following sixty years a series of events, each real, each traumatic, each seeming to confirm the old story, reloaded it. By 2008 the story was loaded. Part 4 will explain why it took the crises of a new generation to fire it.

Table of Contents

Somnath Again

The republic’s first argument about the memory of Islamic rule took place, fittingly, at Somnath.

In 1947 the coastal state of Junagadh, home to the temple ruins, had a Muslim Nawab and a mostly Hindu population. The Nawab acceded to Pakistan; India took control of the state within weeks and confirmed it with a referendum in early 1948. In November 1947 Sardar Patel visited the ruined temple and pledged that it would be rebuilt. The project was taken up by K.M. Munshi, a Congress minister and the novelist whose Jay Somnath Part 2 described. Gandhi, before his death, had advised that the rebuilding be paid for by the public rather than by the government, and so it was. Patel died in December 1950, before the temple was finished.

When the newly built shrine was ready for consecration in May 1951, the President of India, Rajendra Prasad, accepted an invitation to perform the ceremony. Nehru objected. He wrote to Prasad advising him not to go, warning that the event would be read as the head of a secular state lending his office to Hindu revivalism. Prasad went anyway. In his speech he said that the rebuilding showed that the power of creation is always greater than the power of destruction.

It is worth pausing on this disagreement, because both men had a point, and the way the republic resolved it shaped the next seventy years. Nehru was right that a state committed to equal citizenship could not take sides in a dispute between religious memories without unsettling the minority that had just lived through Partition. Prasad and Munshi were right that the rebuilding of a temple destroyed and restored again and again over nine centuries was not, in itself, an act of aggression against anyone; it was an act of recovery, and a democratic state that refused to acknowledge it would leave millions of its citizens feeling that their history was an embarrassment.

The republic, under Nehru, chose distance. The state would neither celebrate nor mourn the medieval past. It would build dams and steel plants, the “temples of modern India,” in Nehru’s famous phrase, and leave the old temples to private faith. That choice kept communal temperatures low for a generation. It also left the work of meaning-making to others. When the Hindu nationalist movement returned to the center of Indian politics four decades later, its most powerful mobilization, L.K. Advani’s rath yatra of 1990, set out from the very temple that Nehru had kept at arm’s length. The memory the secular state would not touch had become the property of the movement that would eventually challenge the secular settlement itself.

The Unfinished Grief

The standard secular narrative of independence treats Partition as a tragic but bounded price paid for freedom: a terrible convulsion, but one that the constitutional architecture of a secular republic resolved. That narrative is not wrong. But it is incomplete in a way that has had profound political consequences.

Consider who arrived in India in 1947. Some seven to eight million Hindus and Sikhs fled West Punjab, Sindh and the North-West Frontier, most of them with nothing. Delhi’s population almost doubled in a few years, and its refugee colonies, Lajpat Nagar, Rajinder Nagar and dozens more, were built on the fields around the old city. In Bengal the movement was slower and longer. Hindus left East Pakistan in waves, after the riots of 1950, again in 1964, and in their millions in 1971, when the Pakistani army’s crackdown in East Bengal fell with particular ferocity on Hindus and sent some ten million refugees into India. For these families Partition was not a constitutional event. It was the loss of a home, a village, a family member, a daughter, and it did not end in 1947.

What the secular state could not easily accommodate was the specifically Hindu experience of this loss, not as a political event but as a civilizational one. For many refugee families, Partition confirmed a fear that, as Parts 1 and 2 showed, had been taught and retaught for a century: that Hindu society on its own sacred ground was not safe; that it could be divided; that its women could be taken and its men killed. The memories Partition reactivated were not abstractions. They were family stories, and they slotted with terrible ease into the older stories of Chittor and jauhar that Bengali and Punjabi children had learned at school.

The state did resettle the refugees, at enormous cost and with real success. What it did not do was acknowledge the grief in any public, collective way. There was no national memorial to the dead of Partition, no official day of mourning, no reckoning with what had been done on both sides. The new republic asked its Hindu citizens, in effect, to transcend their grief in the name of national unity, to perform an act of collective generosity toward the Muslims who had stayed. Many did so, with remarkable grace. But a wound that is managed rather than mourned does not close. The resentment that followed was not irrational. It was the predictable response of people whose most intimate historical wound had been handled by institutional silence rather than recognition. It would take until 2021 for the Indian government to set aside a day, 14 August, to remember the horrors of Partition, and by then even that gesture was read through the politics this series describes.

The refugees also changed Indian politics directly. In 1947 RSS volunteers had worked in the refugee camps of Punjab and Delhi, and they earned a gratitude that lasted. The Punjabi refugee neighborhoods of Delhi became one of the earliest urban strongholds of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the political party founded in 1951 with RSS support.

The silence extended to how the nation taught its history. In the decades after independence, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, founded in 1961, commissioned school textbooks from distinguished historians such as Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, R.S. Sharma and Satish Chandra. Their scholarship was serious, and their aim, shared with the government’s own drive for “national integration,” was explicit: to emphasize India’s composite culture and its social and economic history rather than its religious conflicts. The textbooks said relatively little about temple destruction, forced conversion or medieval massacres. To their authors this was a matter of proportion and responsibility. To many readers, especially those whose grandparents had told them very different stories, it looked like denial.

The textbooks became a battlefield. The Janata government tried to withdraw some of them in 1977. In 1998 the journalist Arun Shourie published Eminent Historians, a polemic accusing the secular historical establishment of systematic distortion. When the BJP-led government came to power it rewrote the textbooks in 2002, and its successor reversed the changes in 2004. Each side accused the other of propaganda, and each had some evidence. The casualty was the honest middle ground described in Part 1: the history in which the violence and the synthesis are both true. With the classroom contested, the memory went home, into families, community lore and, later, the smartphone, where no historian could correct it.

The Other Silence

There was a second silence in the young republic, and it concerned the roughly thirty-five million Muslims who remained in India after Partition.

The most striking case is Hyderabad. The princely state, ruled by a Muslim Nizam over a large Hindu majority, refused to join India in 1947. Through 1947 and 1948 a Muslim militia, the Razakars, terrorized Hindu villages in the state. In September 1948 the Indian army moved in, in a five-day operation officially called a “police action,” and the Nizam surrendered. What followed was among the worst episodes of communal violence in independent India’s history, and among the least known. A team sent by Nehru’s government, led by the Congress leader Pandit Sunderlal, reported that “at a very conservative estimate, at least 27,000 to 40,000 Muslims lost their lives during and after the Police Action.” The report was never published. It surfaced only in the late 1980s and became widely available only in 2013.

The Muslims who stayed in India after 1947 were, in large part, those with the least means to leave. Much of the educated Muslim middle class and almost the entire leadership of the Muslim League in northern India went to Pakistan. Those who remained were disproportionately poor, rural and artisanal, the ajlaf of Part 1, now without the ashraf leaders who had claimed to speak for them. Urdu lost its official standing in Uttar Pradesh, where in 1951 Hindi became the sole official language. Muslim representation in government service fell sharply. And every Muslim’s loyalty was, quietly or openly, under suspicion. Every riot, every war with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, every cricket match, became an occasion for a loyalty test that no other Indian citizen had to pass.

The Congress party, which dominated Indian politics for three decades, managed this community in a particular way. It relied on Muslim votes, delivered largely through clerics, notables and local intermediaries, and in return it offered symbolic protection rather than material advancement. Muslim personal law was left untouched, even as Hindu personal law was reformed in the 1950s. A subsidy helped Muslims make the Haj pilgrimage. Muslim religious leaders were consulted and honored. What the community did not receive, in any proportion to its numbers, was education, jobs, credit and political representation. This arrangement would produce, by the 2000s, a strange paradox: a community widely described as “appeased” that was, on almost every measure of welfare, falling behind.

So the republic carried two silences, each the mirror of the other. Hindu grief over Partition and the medieval past was managed rather than acknowledged. Muslim fear and deprivation after Partition were managed rather than addressed. In both cases the state offered gestures in place of reckoning. And in both cases the unaddressed grievance did not disappear. It waited for someone to name it.

The Long Simmer

For three decades after independence, Hindu nationalism was a minor force in Indian electoral politics. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, founded in 1951 by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who had left Nehru’s cabinet over its policy toward Pakistan, won only a few percent of the national vote through the 1950s and peaked at a little over nine percent in 1967. The RSS, meanwhile, grew patiently: shakha by shakha, school by school, building a network of affiliated organizations for students, workers, tribal communities and, from 1964, a Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) to bring Hindu religious leaders together.

Below the surface of electoral politics, communal violence recurred with grim regularity. Jabalpur in 1961, Ranchi in 1967, Ahmedabad in 1969, Bhiwandi in 1970, Moradabad in 1980, Meerut in 1987, Bhagalpur in 1989: each riot killed dozens or hundreds, most of them Muslims, and each was investigated by a commission whose report was usually shelved. In 1987, near Meerut, men of the Uttar Pradesh police’s armed constabulary took around forty Muslim men from the Hashimpura neighborhood, shot them and threw their bodies into a canal. It took thirty-one years for a court to convict anyone. The riots were local and episodic. They did not yet have a national story to attach themselves to. But they kept the old fear alive on both sides, and each one became, for the families involved, a memory of its own.

Three episodes of the late 1970s and early 1980s matter especially for what came later.

The first was the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, when Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties and jailed her opponents. The RSS was banned again, and its cadres went to prison alongside socialists, Gandhians and liberals. When the Emergency ended, the Jana Sangh merged into the Janata Party coalition that defeated Mrs Gandhi, and its leaders, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee as foreign minister, sat in the national government for the first time. The experience did for Hindu nationalism what three decades of patient organizing had not: it made the movement respectable. When the Janata coalition collapsed, partly over its members’ continuing links to the RSS, the former Jana Sangh leaders founded the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1980.

The second was the conversion at Meenakshipuram. On 19 February 1981, in a village in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district, around 180 Dalit families, about eleven hundred people, converted to Islam, saying they were tired of humiliation and violence at the hands of local landowning castes. The conversion caused national alarm, with allegations of foreign money and inducements, and many of the converts later returned to Hinduism. But it was, in modern form, exactly the double barrier described in Part 1: a community pushed out of Hinduism by caste oppression, leaving together, as a group, because no individual could leave alone. The Hindu nationalist response was revealing. It did not focus mainly on ending the caste atrocities that had driven the conversion. It focused on Hindu unity and the threat of conversion. The VHP launched mass mobilizations across the country, including a great Ekatmata Yatra, a “pilgrimage of unity,” in 1983, and in 1984 it began a campaign to “liberate” the birthplace of Ram at Ayodhya.

The third was the violence of 1983 and 1984, which showed that mass communal killing in India was not the monopoly of any one movement. On 18 February 1983, in the village of Nellie in Assam, during an agitation against “foreigners” said to have crossed from Bangladesh, mobs killed somewhere between two and three thousand Bengali-speaking Muslims in about seven hours. Many of the victims’ families had lived in Assam since the 1930s. Not one person was ever convicted; the cases were dropped under the Assam Accord of 1985, and the official inquiry report was never published. Hold on to the word “foreigners.” It will return in Part 4, in Bengal, in 2026. Then, on 31 October 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, and in the following days mobs, many allegedly led by local Congress politicians, killed some three thousand Sikhs, most of them in Delhi. Her son Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded her, remarked that “when a big tree falls, the earth shakes.”

In the general election of December 1984, Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress won 414 seats, the largest majority in Indian history. The new BJP won two. Hindu nationalism, it seemed, had no electoral future. Within five years, it would have eighty-five seats, and within fifteen, the prime ministership. Something was about to change, and the first move would be made not by the BJP, but by the Congress itself.

1986: The Year Both Locks Opened

In April 1985 the Supreme Court ruled on the case of Shah Bano, an elderly Muslim woman from Indore whose husband had divorced her and refused to pay her maintenance. The court held that she was entitled to support under the ordinary criminal law that applied to every Indian, and the Chief Justice added remarks about the desirability of a uniform civil code. Orthodox Muslim organizations protested that the judgment interfered with Islamic personal law, and mounted a vast campaign. Rajiv Gandhi’s government, with its enormous majority, gave way. In May 1986 Parliament passed a law that effectively overturned the judgment for Muslim women. A young Muslim minister in the government, Arif Mohammad Khan, resigned in protest.

Three months before that law was passed, on 1 February 1986, a district judge in Faizabad ordered the locks on the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya opened, so that Hindus could worship at the idols that had been placed inside the mosque in 1949. The order was carried out within the hour, and state television was on hand to film it. Many observers, then and since, have read the two decisions as a balancing act by a government trying to placate both communities’ religious leaders at once. Whatever the intention, the effect was catastrophic.

The Shah Bano episode created, in its modern form, the most powerful word in the Hindu nationalist vocabulary: appeasement. Here, it seemed, was proof that the secular state would bend the law of the land to please Muslim clerics, while asking Hindus to accept reform of their own personal law and to set aside their historical grievances. It is worth being precise about who was actually sacrificed. It was not Hindus. It was Muslim women, whose rights were traded away for the approval of conservative men claiming to speak for the whole community. But the lesson most Hindus drew was the one the Hindu nationalists taught: that the state gave way to Muslim pressure, and that Hindus would get nothing unless they too organized as a bloc. The opening of the locks taught the same lesson from the other direction: that mobilization in the name of religion worked.

Then came television. In January 1987 the state broadcaster Doordarshan began showing Ramanand Sagar’s serialization of the Ramayan, followed in 1988 by B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat. The decision was made by a Congress government that did not foresee its political consequences. Streets emptied on Sunday mornings. Tens of millions of viewers, across every region and caste, watched the same Ram, the same Sita and the same Ayodhya, week after week, sometimes garlanding their television sets. For a country whose Hindu traditions had always been plural and regional, as Part 1 described, this was something new: a single, shared, visual version of the epic, delivered nationwide at the precise moment when a movement was mobilizing to build a temple at Ram’s birthplace. The serials gave hundreds of millions of people a common emotional vocabulary of Hindu civilizational pride, and the Ayodhya movement had a ready audience.

The Congress kept making the same move. In November 1989 the government allowed the VHP to perform a foundation-laying ceremony for the temple near the disputed site, and Rajiv Gandhi opened his election campaign in Faizabad, promising Ram Rajya. That June, the BJP had formally adopted the Ayodhya temple as its own cause. In the election that followed, Congress lost power, and the BJP’s tally rose from two seats to eighty-five. The secular party had opened the door. The Hindu nationalist party walked through it.

Kashmir, 1990

In the winter of 1989 and 1990, the Kashmir Valley erupted in armed insurgency against Indian rule. The movement was led at first by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, which sought independence and had secular roots, but Islamist groups backed by Pakistan grew rapidly in strength. In September 1989 militants shot dead Tika Lal Taploo, a prominent Kashmiri Pandit lawyer and BJP leader, in Srinagar. In November they killed a retired Pandit judge who had sentenced a separatist leader to death. Threatening letters and posters appeared, and slogans calling on Pandits to leave rang out from some mosque loudspeakers. In January 1990, as Delhi imposed a new governor, Jagmohan, and the state government resigned, panic spread through the Pandit community.

Within weeks, the great majority of the Valley’s Hindus had left. Scholars estimate that some ninety thousand to one hundred thousand of a Pandit population of perhaps one hundred twenty to one hundred forty thousand fled, mostly to camps in Jammu and to Delhi; community organizations give higher figures. The number of Pandits killed is also disputed: the Jammu and Kashmir government recorded 219 Pandit deaths between 1989 and 2004, while a Pandit community organization counted nearly four hundred between 1990 and 2011. Some Kashmiri Muslims believed that Jagmohan had encouraged the departure in order to clear the way for a crackdown; most scholars attribute it to genuine terror in the face of targeted killings and the absence of any credible promise of protection. In the conflict that followed, insurgency and counter-insurgency killed tens of thousands of people, most of them Kashmiri Muslims.

The exodus of 1990 occupies a unique place in this series, because it is the one point where the medieval memory of Part 1 and lived modern experience coincided almost exactly. Kashmiri Pandits had preserved, for six centuries, the memory of Sultan Sikandar the idol-breaker and of earlier flights from the Valley. In 1990 that memory was no longer history. An ancient Hindu community, in one of the oldest centers of Sanskrit learning, was driven from its homeland by armed men invoking Islam, while the Indian state failed to protect it. For Hindu nationalists it was the clearest possible proof that the old story was still true.

And the secular establishment, for the most part, looked away. This is not to say that no one wrote about the Pandits or that their suffering was denied. But for years, in much liberal and human-rights discourse, the Kashmir conflict was framed primarily as a story of the Indian state’s abuses against Kashmiri Muslims, which were real and grave, while the exodus of the Pandits was treated as a footnote, an awkward complication, or a consequence of the state’s own failures. The Pandits felt their catastrophe had become an inconvenient fact. Living in camps in the heat of Jammu, many for decades, they found that the people who spoke most loudly about their loss were the Hindu nationalists.

That pattern, a real atrocity against Hindus, under-acknowledged by secular opinion and therefore owned by the Hindu right, would repeat itself again and again. Part 4 will show what happened when, thirty-two years later, it reached the cinema.

When Mandal Met Mandir

On 7 August 1990, Prime Minister V.P. Singh announced that his government would implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, reserving 27 percent of central government jobs for the Other Backward Classes, the vast middle stratum of Indian society between the upper castes and the Dalits. Upper-caste students protested across northern India, and several set themselves on fire. Seven weeks later, on 25 September, L.K. Advani of the BJP set out from Somnath in a Toyota van decorated as a chariot, on a rath yatra, a chariot procession, bound for Ayodhya. The two events have been paired ever since as “Mandal and Mandir,” or in the phrase of the time, Mandal versus kamandal, the reservations commission against the ascetic’s water-pot.

The common reading is that Mandir was the Hindu nationalist answer to Mandal: a campaign to unite Hindus across caste at the very moment when reservations threatened to divide them along caste lines. That reading is correct as far as it goes. In the short run, Mandal won in the Hindi heartland. Through the 1990s, parties built on OBC and Dalit votes, the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Bahujan Samaj Party, dominated Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and the most numerous and powerful OBC castes, such as the Yadavs, voted for them rather than for the BJP. As late as 2009, according to the Lokniti-CSDS surveys, only about 22 percent of OBC voters supported the BJP nationally.

But the longer story is more interesting, and it is the one my earlier essay tried to tell. Mandal gave the OBC communities something genuinely transformative: formal recognition that the caste hierarchy had wronged them, and a concrete mechanism for entering education and government employment. What it could not give them was dignity of the civilizational kind. By making caste the organizing principle of advancement, Mandal affirmed OBC identity and, at the same time, coded it as a history of victimhood. To advance under Mandal was to keep announcing one’s historical oppression. For an upwardly mobile OBC family that had fought its way out of agrarian marginality, this was psychologically costly. And over time it became clear that Mandal’s benefits flowed disproportionately to a few dominant OBC castes, leaving hundreds of smaller ones feeling that they had swapped one hierarchy for another.

Hindu nationalism offered those communities an elegant resolution: a supra-caste identity, not Yadav or Kurmi or Lodh but Hindu, that was civilizationally prestigious, politically powerful and entirely free of the stigma of victimhood. You could be materially compensated by Mandal and culturally honored by Hindutva. The two were not rival tracks but complementary dimensions of one aspiration: the aspiration for full recognition in a society that had long denied it. The BJP understood this early. In 1991 it made Kalyan Singh, an OBC leader from the Lodh community, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. The full harvest would take another two decades, and Part 4 will trace it. But the logic was set in 1990.

This is the caste paradox of Part 1 in its modern form. Savarkar had wanted to unite Hindus by breaking caste. The movement that inherited his ideas found a different route. It did not dissolve caste. It built a Hindu political identity on top of it, leaving caste intact as a social structure, and as a set of reserved benefits, while offering every caste a share in a common civilizational pride. Mandal and Mandir were not ultimately opposites. They became two floors of the same building.

Advani’s chariot never reached Ayodhya. He was arrested in Bihar in October 1990 on the orders of the state’s Chief Minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav, an OBC leader. The BJP withdrew its support from V.P. Singh’s government, which fell. Days later, police in Ayodhya opened fire on crowds of kar sevaks, temple volunteers, trying to reach the mosque, killing a number of them; the death toll remains disputed, and the dead became martyrs of the movement. In the election of 1991 the BJP won 120 seats. That September, Parliament passed the Places of Worship Act, which froze the religious character of every place of worship in India as it stood on 15 August 1947, with a single exception: Ayodhya. It was a legal dam built to hold back every other dispute of the kind.

On 6 December 1992, a crowd of kar sevaks, assembled at Ayodhya for what had been promised would be a symbolic ceremony, climbed the domes of the Babri Masjid and tore the mosque down by hand in a few hours, while senior BJP leaders watched from a nearby platform. Forty-one years after Rajendra Prasad consecrated the rebuilt Somnath, the cycle had turned: the republic that had kept its distance from the memory of temple destruction now watched a mosque destroyed in its name. Riots across India killed around two thousand people. In Bombay, in December 1992 and January 1993, some nine hundred died, most of them Muslims; a judicial commission later found that the Shiv Sena had played a leading role in the violence. On 12 March 1993, a series of bombs planned by an underworld network with Pakistani backing, as revenge for the riots, killed 257 people in Bombay. Each atrocity became the justification for the next, exactly as in 1946.

The inquiry into the demolition, the Liberhan Commission, took seventeen years to report. The criminal trial of the leaders accused of conspiracy ended in 2020 with all of them acquitted. In 2019, as Part 4 will describe, the Supreme Court awarded the site to the temple. But by then the meaning of 6 December 1992 was settled in the memory of both communities. For one, it was the reversal of an ancient insult. For the other, it was the proof that the republic’s promises were conditional.

The Global Accelerant

In 1998 the BJP came to power at the head of a coalition, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as Prime Minister. Coalition politics restrained it: the temple, the abolition of Kashmir’s special status and a uniform civil code were set aside to keep its allies on board. But the decade that followed supplied the old memory with something it had never had before: a global, contemporary vocabulary.

The sequence was relentless. In 1999 Pakistani forces infiltrated the heights of Kargil, and India fought a short war to expel them. In December 1999 an Indian Airlines flight was hijacked to Kandahar, and the government released three militants to free the passengers. On 11 September 2001 the attacks on New York and Washington turned “Islamic terrorism” into the organizing idea of world politics. On 13 December 2001, militants attacked the Indian Parliament. For a generation of Indians, the medieval invader, the Partition killer and the modern jihadi began to merge into a single figure, and now the whole Western world seemed to confirm that the figure was real.

Then came Gujarat. On 27 February 2002, a coach of the Sabarmati Express carrying Hindu volunteers back from Ayodhya caught fire near the station at Godhra, and 59 people died. A court later convicted thirty-one Muslims of conspiracy to set the fire. In the days that followed, mobs across Gujarat killed Muslims in their homes and neighborhoods. The official toll was 1,044 dead, 790 of them Muslims and 254 Hindus; human rights groups put the number of dead at up to two thousand, and tens of thousands of Muslims were driven into relief camps. The Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time was Narendra Modi. Investigators appointed by the Supreme Court later found no evidence to prosecute him, and the court upheld that finding in 2022. But for years he was refused a visa to the United States, and Gujarat 2002 became, for India’s Muslims, the chosen trauma of their generation, as Partition had been for their grandparents. For many Hindus, especially in Gujarat, it became something else: the moment when Hindus, for once, had not simply endured.

That difference in memory is the whole argument of this series in miniature. The same days were remembered by one community as a pogrom and by many in the other as a reaction to Godhra. Each community kept its own dead.

Nationally, though, the BJP lost. In 2004 Vajpayee’s government campaigned on “India Shining” and was defeated by a Congress-led coalition under Manmohan Singh. That government commissioned the most thorough study of Indian Muslims ever undertaken, chaired by Justice Rajinder Sachar, and its report in 2006 demolished the idea that Muslims were a privileged, appeased community. Muslims were 13.4 percent of the population in 2001, but held 3 percent of posts in the elite Indian Administrative Service, 1.8 percent in the Foreign Service and 4 percent in the Police Service. Their literacy rate was 59 percent against a national average of 65. Their poverty rate, at 31 percent, was second only to that of Dalits and Adivasis. The “appeased” community was, on almost every measure, falling behind.

And yet, within weeks of the report, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a meeting of the National Development Council that minorities, “particularly the Muslim minority,” must have “the first claim on resources.” He meant it as a commitment to remedy the deprivation Sachar had documented. It was heard as the purest possible statement of appeasement, and it has been quoted against the Congress ever since. The pattern of the Nehruvian decades repeated itself: words of symbolic favor that inflamed one community, without the material change that would have helped the other.

The terror continued. Bombs in Delhi in 2005, on Mumbai’s suburban trains in 2006, in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi again in 2008, killed hundreds; several were claimed by a home-grown group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen. A separate set of blasts, at Malegaon and on the Samjhauta Express to Pakistan, was blamed by investigators on Hindu extremists, prompting talk of “saffron terror”; those prosecutions ended, years later, in acquittals, and became a grievance of their own. Then, on 26 November 2008, ten gunmen from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba landed by sea in Mumbai and killed 166 people over three days, at a railway station, a hospital, a Jewish center and two luxury hotels. The siege was broadcast live to the whole nation.

By the end of 2008, every element of the old story had been given a fresh, televised, contemporary form. The invader was now a terrorist. The temple wound was now a demolished mosque and a burned train. The state’s weakness was now a hijacked plane and a burning hotel. And still, in the general election of 2009, Indian voters returned the Congress to power with more seats than before. The BJP won 116. The memory was loaded, but something else was needed before it would fire.

The Memory Reloaded

Step back from the sixty years this essay has covered, and a pattern emerges.

The republic began with a deliberate choice to keep the wound out of public life. That choice was made by people who had just watched hundreds of thousands die, and it is hard to fault them for it. But the memory did not disappear. It went underground, into refugee colonies and family stories, and then, one event at a time, it was reloaded. Each event was real. Each was traumatic. And each seemed to confirm, in a new and contemporary form, an element of the old story that Parts 1 and 2 traced. Partition confirmed that Hindu women could be taken and Hindu homelands lost. Meenakshipuram revived the fear of conversion. Shah Bano supplied the charge of appeasement. Ayodhya reopened the wound with a wall, the mosque on the temple’s ground. Kashmir delivered an exodus that matched the medieval memory almost exactly. Godhra, Kargil, Kandahar, the Parliament attack and 26/11 dressed the invader in modern clothes. The psychiatrist Vamik Volkan, whom we met in Part 1, called this kind of experience “time collapse”: the moment when a centuries-old trauma is felt as if it were happening now, and present-day neighbors are seen as the ancient enemy. Between 1947 and 2008, India lived through one time collapse after another.

The same decades built a mirror image on the other side. Indian Muslims accumulated their own chosen traumas: Hyderabad in 1948, Nellie, Bhagalpur, Hashimpura, the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Bombay and Gujarat. Each of these, too, was real. Each was under-acknowledged by the majority. And each confirmed, for the community that suffered it, its own oldest fear, that its place in India was conditional. Two communities, living side by side, were each building a memory in which the other was the aggressor and itself the victim. This is how chosen traumas work. They do not merely record the past. They organize the present.

And between the two stood a secular political class that, for the most part, managed both memories with gestures rather than engaging either with honesty. To Hindus it offered silence about the medieval past and Partition. To Muslims it offered symbolic protection without material advancement. To both it offered the language of tolerance, which each community heard as a demand that it alone should be tolerant. The result was a double failure. Hindus came to believe that their grievances would never be acknowledged by the secular state. Muslims came to believe that their deprivation would never be addressed by it. Both were largely right.

Yet here is the fact that any honest account must confront. By 2009 all of this had happened, and the Hindu nationalist party had still lost two national elections in a row. The memory was loaded. It was not enough. A chosen trauma can explain the intensity of a feeling, but not why tens of millions of people suddenly decide that it should govern their vote. For that, the memory needed a constituency in crisis: a generation for whom the old story suddenly answered new and urgent questions about work, dignity, masculinity, family and meaning.

That generation was growing up in the India that economic liberalization made after 1991. Its crises, and the political movement that recognized them, are the subject of Part 4: The Crystallization.

Sources and Further Reading

Author’s Note: This article was conceptualized, researched, and outlined by the author, with generative AI tools utilized to assist in drafting and refining the prose.

Articles in this series:

  1. The Wounded Civilization — Part 1: The Soil and the Encounter
  2. The Wounded Civilization — Part 2: The Narrators
  3. The Wounded Civilization — Part 3: The Inheritance
  4. The Wounded Civilization — Part 4: The Crystallization

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